Hollywood celebrated the life of legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune on Monday, honoring him with a star on its iconic Walk of Fame two decades after his death. Mifune rose to stardom through filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s classics, including “Rashomon” (1950) and “Seven Samurai” (1954), ...

Ryoma Sakamoto (1835-1867), among Japan’s most beloved heroes, came of age when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s Black Ships arrived demanding trade relations and ending the country’s closed-door foreign policy. The old Japan ruled by the feudal Tokugawa shogunate was giving way to the modern ...

In September 1912, Gen. Maresuke Nogi — a hero of the Russo-Japanese War — committed ritual suicide. His sensational death took place on the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral, making it an act of junshi (following one’s lord in death) and a high-water mark ...

Tai Kato (1916-85) has long ranked high on critics’ lists as a neglected director, and the neglect continues, especially overseas. Despite the occasional screening abroad, starting with a showing of his 1969 masterpiece “Red Peony Gambler: Flower Cards Match” in Pesaro, Italy, in 1984, ...

Japan had a pacifist “constitution” long before 1947, when the current one went into effect. It was issued in the year 604, its author so esteemed, in his own time and since, as to merit the posthumous name Shotoku Taishi (Crown Prince Sage-Virtue). His ...

The gray spring clouds have given way to a gentle drizzle by the time I pull my car into a spacious parking lot bordering the Tabaruzaka battlefield. It’s fitting weather, considering the massive battle that took place here in 1877 in this rural corner ...

Japanese can roughly be split into two camps: those equipped with an encyclopedic knowledge of history and those who have only a vague idea of who the samurai were or that a Shogun once lived in what is now the Imperial Palace. The history ...

Samurai may be known as a man’s pursuit, but feudal Japan produced a number of legendary female warriors who took to the battlefield with a sword that still holds a high cultural position today. The image of the katana sword continues to draw interest ...

Google Japan Inc. has opened a studio for the production of samurai drama films at the Roppongi Hills building in Tokyo, the Japanese unit of the U.S. Internet search giant said Tuesday. The studio will be made available free of charge until the end ...

Samurai Japan manager Hiroki Kokubo hopes that right-hander Chihiro Kaneko will continue in Friday’s Game 2 of the Japan-Major League All-Star Series what teammate Kenta Maeda started in a 2-0 win in Game 1. Kokubo called Kaneko, who won this year’s Sawamura Award as ...

You wouldn’t expect a punk musician to write decent novels, any more than you’d expect a boxer to be good at darning. The talents prized by the former vocation — restlessness, insouciance, hard-wired disregard for authority — don’t lend themselves to the rigors of ...

Japan’s biggest travel agency is launching a bus tour with some decidedly homegrown touches — a flying ninja and sword-carrying samurai. The one-hour “Samurai & Ninja Safari” tour around Tokyo features a bilingual guide pointing out key sights and then a spin around historic ...